When the tech-savviest people on the planet meet, how do they exchange contact info? The same people who hail taxis by app and pay back friends via email have a wild way of sharing details: They hand over paper business cards.

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And the only thing worse than handing over business cards is not having any to hand over. My own new business cards have yet to be printed. But if everyone I meet these days has a smartphone, with memory and wireless capabilities galore, why do I even need these 3.5 x 2 inch pieces of card stock?

Instead of just waiting for them in the mail, I decided to seek out the paper cards' digital replacement. The smartphone may yet hold the key, and a few new technologies are quite promising. But most options are limited or overly complicated. We're still waiting for the business-card equivalent of OpenTable or Pandora when it comes to a hassle-free, cost-effective alternative.

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An overwhelming number of apps let you snap a photo of a business card and turn them into address book entries.
Andrew Evans for The Wall Street Journal

People have tried, of course.
Google
's
Beam lets you hold phones together to transfer information. It uses wireless "near field communication" and works really well—provided both phones are NFC-enabled and run Android. IPhones don't have the necessary chips. Still, I'm not entirely sure why more Android users don't use Beam.

Google also owns Bump. When you tapped two phones together, their sensors "felt" the unique collision and the app swapped info via the Internet. IPhones and Android phones played well together, and I often used it to transfer photos. Then last week, Google shut it down.

Evernote, the popular note-syncing service, updated its Hello app last year with a novel feature: Users could swap contact info with audio tones. A welcome sound serves as a kind of mating call, as phones discover another is nearby. I've used the free service to swap info between iPhones and Android devices, but it takes too many steps to compete with a business-card handoff. And Evernote says it doesn't plan to keep working much more on the Hello app. Instead it will bring some core features over to its main Evernote app, and the audio feature won't make the jump.

It became evident fairly quickly that living without business cards would be difficult. So what if I made my next card smartphone friendly? I could opt for a QR code—those Rorschach-looking square bar codes—but bar-code scanning requires special apps and transferring info to address books isn't automatic.

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Evernote's business card scanning feature converts scanned cards into text in seconds, but it can be pricey.
Evernote

Some business-card makers want to embed NFC tags into the cards themselves. That makes cards expensive. A company called Tapmy.Biz charges $2 a piece.

That's why I was excited to learn about a startup called Touchbase Technologies, which is making paper cards with "conductive ink" that work with the iPhone and cost less. The company says its unique dot pattern emulates finger taps on a phone's screen. Hold the card to a phone and—boom—the info pops up almost instantly.

Information isn't transferred from the card. Instead, the card directs the phone to the card holder's Touchbase profile, with contact info, photos and videos. But it's in the early stages. Debuting on Indiegogo this week, the service won't let you export info to an address book, and support is initially limited to iPhones.

Making cards smartphone-friendly invites chicken-or-egg situations. If I choose one option, most people I meet still won't have it, or may prefer a different one.

That's why the best way to kill off business cards—for now and for a long time to come—is to scan them and toss them.

I've always wanted a business-card scanner and I've enjoyed playing with the $500 NeatConnect, which rapidly uploads cards, receipts and other documents straight to the cloud, rather than to a computer. But the scanner in my pocket—my smartphone—doesn't require an extra carry-on bag. The challenge is wading through the overwhelming number of apps that promise to turn your snapped cards into address book entries.

LinkedIn's free CardMunch uses humans, instead of digital means, to transcribe your card scans. When I tried it, the humans took their time: over 6 hours for two cards. (A LinkedIn representative says the company aims to send back card transcriptions within 24 hours.) After all that wait, one of the cards returned marked "Cannot Read Name." I quickly gave up on humans.

Evernote's business card scanning feature—which can be found in the main app as well as the Hello app—is fast, converting snapped cards into text in seconds. The catch? It costs $5 a month, or $45 a year, for unlimited scanning. (If you don't pay, you get just five free scans a month.)

The best choice I've found is CamCard: $2.99 up front currently gets you unlimited card scanning. (There's also a free, ad-supported version that offers a limited number of scans.) It's fast and accurate, and when you scan someone in, you can easily send that person your own info via email or text.

I find it hard to imagine these scraps of paper won't be replaced by a wireless exchange, through smartphones or even, one day, a wearable or surgically implanted technology. For now, I'm awaiting the delivery of 500 new paper rectangles so people will know how to email, text or tweet at me.

—Watch Joanna Stern's digital business-card odyssey in her latest video at WSJ.com/Tech. Contact her at joanna.stern@wsj.com and on Twitter at @joannastern.

i think you should try Bizcuit app, as I 've been using it recently in 2014, and it is available for Android and iPhone. My friend in Singapore told me about it that it is basically a social network for business cards,Pretty useful tho

The business card isn't dead, but the best business card today is your own book. True, everyone doesn't have a great book in them. Then again, many do. I've presented a popular and very practical 2-part book publishing seminar at conferences and colleges across the U.S. and in Canada. I would be happy to send the handouts from that seminar to any reader. Just send me a quick note at mailto:dsanford@corban.edu. You can check out my professional credentials at http://www.linkedin.com/in/drsanford

I have been using CamCard for a couple of years and I like it. I used to scan cards at the conference table and hand them back rather than throwing the a way later. I have retired and don't do it much now.

I also think it is funny that we are still searching for electronic card exchange when Palm had this feature built into their PDA platforms 10 or 15 years ago. I remember beaming contact info to friends at conferences many years ago.

As soon as a scanning technology is accepted, someone will figure out how to abuse it. Allowing strangers' devices to transmit into your device is akin to unprotected digital sex; you'll end up with a virus

I urge you all to try SocialTagg (http://socialtagg.com). We've built a business card replacement system that is based off QR codes. This way, only one party needs to have the app in order to exchange contact information. Try it out, it's free on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone!

My latest method of handling business cards is to scan them into one of my laptops using Scanner Mouse, a device I picked up for about $40 on clearance at Brookstone. The mouse (yes, it is a real mouse, too) has OCR software and does a great job of scanning and storing documents on your computer. The material is editable - a benefit over scanners that just make pictures of a document. You can export to your address book, Evernote, Docs to Go, or other applications.

As I get older, I would say with the predictable memory loss, business cards are a necessity.

The solution is, of course, obvious. Put a couple of 2D bar codes, aka QR codes, on the card that can be scanned into a database application in digital format. You can then keep your cardboard or not as you please. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code

When you and I exchange cards at some event, I quickly scribble on your card the event and date we met, and why I am interested in following up with you. I might do this a dozen or more times during the evening. When I get home, I empty all these cards out, review my notes, and make three stacks: Those I really want to contact, maybe, and wastebasket. I recall the look of your card, including the logo and tagline, and that helps me recall you a week or month later. Any electronic version that doesn't let me all do this is USELESS. As soon as you stop using biz cards and decide to rely on electronic means, someone will come along who you really want to remember and follow up with, and you'll be writing key data on the back of a napkin. And you'll get a number wrong. I say, 50, 100 years from now, people will still be exchanging business cards.

Back of most cards is wasted. Why not print front as usual, and print QR code or bar code of name, address, etc on back, to be scanned into fields of standard contact database. Incremental cost of printing both sides is trivial, and both paper and electronic needs are satisfied without annoyance.

This is a technology hammer looking for a nail. It's easy to take a paper business card from someone, slip it in your pocket (add a quick note in pencil if needed), and decide later what you want to do with the information. At least the author of the article admits she is awaiting her next shipment of paper business cards.

Certainly a low cost way to do things. My dog has a LinkedIn account. I will have to remember to add that to his business card. Given that you could always use the reverse of the card for the QR code space, you could have a number of links off of it. One could be to you on your company web site.

And yes, my dog does have a LinkedIn account and business card. I figured that with harrop always mentioning LinkedIn, I would get Titan Ledsham one. He "works" as a therapy dog on a volunteer basis. Thus the biz card.

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